The present ubiquity of digital cameras, mobile phone cameras, portable video recorders, as well as other devices with integrated cameras has resulted in a large and ever growing body of media objects. In order to manage the sheer volume of still images, videos, audio, and other forms of media, efforts to manage media have come in the form of organizing media objects in location based organizations schemes such as folders. In this way, media objects can be located quickly, and consumed after capture.
However, when media objects are shared between users, locations of the media objects change. With large amounts of media objects being stored on personal and public data stores, local and on the Internet, there have been efforts to implement generalized searching of media objects. However, current non-textual search techniques lag in accuracy and performance behind text-based search techniques. Accordingly, media objects have been associated with text, in the form of metatags, embedded tags, and overloaded file names so that text searching on the associated text can allow textual search techniques to be applied to non-textual data.
Associating text with media objects is cumbersome. Most mobile devices do not have user interfaces with which a user may easily enter text. Even when a media capture device is a mobile device with a text friendly input device, such as a netbook with a keyboard, users are more prone to consume the media object at time of capture and defer associating metadata until later. The end result is that text is rarely associated with the captured media object afterwards, and accordingly the media object is rarely consumed again.